[Zope] some advice for a news site

[Stephen Pitts]

On Wed, Dec 01, 1999 at 09:58:54PM -0400, Luis Bordas wrote:
> We have a project of a Web-zine that has to run on a Linux box. I heard
> about Zope and I'm impressed so far.
> 
> The site will have functionality like "related news" and "send this to a
> friend". We also need to be able to categorize the content/news and search
> with keywords.
Have you looked at Squishdot? It does provides a slashdot-like interface
to news and is used by several sites (http://www.technocrat.net and
http://www.kdeforum.org). Also, the source is available so you could use
features from it or modify it to suit your needs. It is based on a
more generic product called ZConfera by Digital Creations(??). Check the
Zope site for more info on that.

> 
> There will be "subscribers" that will receive daily tips with links to the
> news on the Web site. Those will be stored in a RDBMS.
You could use a cron script with Python to grab the info from Zope
(XML-RPC) and send the emails.

> 
> We took a look at PHP3 and MySQL as an interesting choice, but after reading
> about Zope we would like to take the better alternative.
I'll second that...PHP3 gets ugly when dealing with medium->large sites

> 
> Is it possible to use the Z ODB to store the news instead of a RDBMS,
> without loosing the functionality we need?... Maybe a combination of Zope
> and MySQL?.
Depends on the size of your data. With the ZMySQLDA (Zope MySQL Database
Adapter), you can run queries on a MySQL database from Zope code and
even encapulate the returned rows as objects! That way, you retain the
flexibility of Zope while your data can be stored in MySQL. 


-- 
Stephen Pitts
smpitts@midsouth.rr.com
webmaster - http://www.mschess.org